Sonic GDK (So How About that Green Hill Paradise Act 2?)

[LongcrierCat]

I've been looking to make sure and apparently no one except a few people are talking about this in a general thread or status update and considering that GDK is fanmade I felt it belonged here. 

So, Sonic GDK, starting with a bit of history. First released on 2010, February 10, the Sonic Games Development Kit has been a collected code source for anyone in the Sonic fanbase at large to develop their own 3D Sonic the Hedgehog fangame. First started by Xaklse, this engine has grown to have many, many contributors building on this engine for the six years and counting since its release. Before modding Sonic Generations was a cool idea, you'd see a whole lot of people port levels over to GDK instead considering that since its inception it could do both 3D and 2D albeit with a bit of scripting via splines. 

Splines, in mathematics and code, is "a numeric function that is piecewise-defined by polynomial functions, and which possesses a high degree of smoothness at the places where the polynomial pieces connect (which are known as knots)." What this does in videogames is make something like a loop de loop run its course automatically irregardless of the speed or momentum you were carrying until you hit the beginning point of the loop de loop. Splines are important to scripting a level's design and programming, making it to where you can never really "mess up" and so it wouldn't be a huge disappointment to a player who didn't do something the way they wanted to. 

So this is where I bring up the biggest thing to hit the Sonic fanbase and franchise in recent history:

 

Sometime late in 2011, a person under the name SuperSonic68 got together a small team and started work on a new level with some tightened controls. Released on 2012, February 13, the original Green Hill Paradise hit, and sent a ton of people, including myself, into a big rush of excitement about what this could mean for any new Sonic game, official and fanmade, should they take after this kind of an experience. These days, Act One doesn't seem so focused, but the real novelty in this was taking advantage of Sonic's abilities and using that to traverse the landscape. It was an open world with a lot to offer, maybe even too much considering the sense of directionless aiming here and there. 

So, it's been four years and SuperSonic68 came back. And to big gaming sites like Kotaku and Geek.com? This release is probably the biggest thing to hit Sonic since Sonic Mania was announced. 

 

Released as of last week this 2016, August 27, Green Hill Paradise Act 2 has hit and it's caught plenty of people by surprise. This game's mechanics have been focused on recreating, as close as possible, an experience that was only capable in a highly tuned copy of Sonic Adventure. In this release you get to have a fully functioning set of rolling and momentum based physics where even your homing attack maintains your momentum. To add to this kind of experience, they brought in something a little similar to the boost but far closer to the origins of the boost function. Introducing to Sonic GDK, GHP Act 2 introduces Mach State, a blast of speed from your momentum gained that pulls in the capability for continuing to run on walls and all kinds of other crazy stunts. 

I've had a lot of playtime on this (over 3 hours). This game is fantastic. This is everything I ever wanted out of 3D Sonic the Hedgehog. It's just fun to even roll into a small incline and use the momentum to jump off the apex of a slope's incline to jump high or to jump off the bottom of a slope and jump faster towards another slope to roll into and gain more momentum. Seriously, I'm saying this. It's a treat. There's glitches here and there, a tiny bit of collision detection problems, but if you can get yourself to a well functioning PC, this is easily the best 3D Sonic game engine ever made. If we see a few zones and a full game come out of this, I'll declare it the best Sonic game ever. It's good. Please play it.

[Tracker_TD]

If GHP 2 does anything, it's show why you can't just tack "Classic physics" into 3D and have some amazing, and perhaps illustrates why Sonic's designed the way he is in 3D nowadays.

What I'm saying is, it's a bit pish, innit.

The level design is pretty bloody awful for one thing, but then again this is a tech demo focused on mechanics rather than level design. Doesn't help those are naff too then: in fact I'm better off just copy-pasting from the other thread:

Quote

Mach state felt finnicky and tough to anticipate and often trying to ascend slopes with the spindash as I would in a classic game somehow yielded worse results than just running up it, Sonic 4 style. The homing attack is somehow worse than Generations too; it's not even handy as a jump extension, in addition to killing all momentum. And spinning locks your controls up anyway; Tails and Knuckles' rolling in SA1 felt better, honestly. Overall the controls just felt incredibly clunky, as with most 3D Sonic fangames; and I kept getting caught on stuff, especially when trying to get out of water. 

Not super impressed overall; feels it's a lot of style and scale, but the actual gameplay and process of going fast isn't fun and constantly interrupted by the failure of the level design to flow between setpieces. It feels like Fan Remix and the first GHZ P; dazzling at first, then the realisation it's just flash. Eh. For a fan effort it's certainly impressive, but far from what I want SEGA to do. I think I'd rather SEGA refine boost; the likes of Generations are far more gratifying than this, automation be damned. 

Again; considering it's a fan effort? It probably is the best fan demo of any sort out there (better than that BlitzSonic bollocks); but compared to SEGA it's just not as fun or mechanically polished as games such as Generations or even Adventure. Super Sonic feels a bit more fun, as you essentially get the boost with him due to how easily he achieves mach state, but even then this is far from "the best 3D Sonic engine ever made." Adventure reinterpreted the Classics for 3D; this doesn't even really reinterpret them per say, it just copies them over without taking into account gameplay in 2D and 3D environments are very different. Granted that's down to GDK itself, but yeah. I've spent an hour or two on it, found all the Chaos Emeralds, and... eh.

Want speed? Earn it... just don't expect that process to be amazingly fun. 

 

[Indigo Rush]

It's definitely a rough demo, but I feel like there's a diamond in that rough. If given some better direction and more intentional level design (which isn't to say the level design isn't intentional), I believe it's the start of the definitive 3D Sonic experience. Needs work, but I think it speaks volumes that I had as much fun as I did with a fangame of all things. It's also worth noting that a lot of the weird non-palatable issues (wonky camera, clipping on walls, imperfect angles for rolling) are due to this being a non-professional effort by a small team; if you gave Sonic Team the task of designing the code around this concept for a 3D Sonic platformer, I think we'd see something truly amazing.

That being said, what makes this fangame so awesome isn't necessarily the final execution, but its proof of concept for 3D Sonic controls. Could it be better? Absolutely. Does that totally override everything its going for? I don't think so. I think GHP2 is one of the most fun experiences I've had controlling Sonic in 3D.

Again... needs work. But I liked it a lot.

[Sean]

Showcase is for one's own works, not fan works in general. Moving to general discussion

[Rey Skywalker-Ren]

It's a very nice concept and I like the idea behind it. You need to remember this game is in the works, so it is a concept at it's best. Of course it isn't gonna be perfect, there's going to be bugs and the controls are far from great especially when rolling. However, taking a step back, I see something that has potential and when finished, has to potential to be something great and something that the fans have been asking for a long time.

 

[Gregzilla]

Disregarding its lack of budget or status as a fan creation or anything like that, let's just look at it in terms of pure quality.  It's a bit of an unpolished mess.  Slopes often snag Sonic in unexpected ways, it's easy to get hit by tiny bits of geometry that slow you down that shouldn't be there, controls can be clunky, some segments are more of a hassle to traverse than they should be, etc.  It's not a clean or professional game by any means, and it certainly wouldn't be acceptable as a legit Sonic game in its current state.

But with all that said, this is by far the closest a 3D Sonic game has come to capturing what I want from the series.

Fact is, despite the clunkiness and frustrating moments, I enjoyed exploring this one big level with these Classic-esque physics more than I enjoyed the entirety of Lost World, the Boost games, or even a good chunk of the Adventure Sonic levels.  And I think that's because it gave me a set of physics-based moves and just asked me to play around in the level.  Unlike Adventure it put more of an effort to have rolling and momentum-based challenges, unlike the Boost games it felt very organic, and unlike Lost World it attempts to make Sonic fun to control rather than just awkward with a bunch of gimmicks on top.  It might be messy, but when I see a chunk of the level in the distance and think "how can I use Sonic's speed and the environment to reach that point?", I think that's a very good sign that the designers at the very least have their heads in the right place.  And in the end, I played it several times and took great joy in seeing how I could traverse the environment in different ways.

A lot of folks are giving it a hard time, and I can understand that, it doesn't exactly scream QUALITY.  But that's just what I think, and y'know what?  I think it's great.  Give something like this a budget and a clean up job, and you'd have something pretty darn special, because even in its unpolished state it's pretty much the best 3D Sonic experience I've had.

[The Deleter]

On mobile rn and can't really go in depth about my thoughts on this just yet, but since I was wanting to make an OP for this just for the sake of getting this in, I might as well post it here anyways:

The physics in this game are linked to your hardware's performance, and less than perfect performance can effect it quite a bit. Dunno the full extent of it, but stuff like spin dash launching speed/heigh, half pipe launching heights, and overall terrain calculation can all take a hit even with the smallest lag.

If you're having problems with the game, or you think it could perform better than it does, try turning the graphics settings down as far as possible. If even that doesn't work, you'll have to adapt, but I've seen videos and streams with vastly differing performances with their physics, and the major difference has always been low frame rates and other issues, compared to solid frame rates and perfect graphics. Dunno how good the physics are at their maximum capacity first hand, but there's definitely a discrepancy between experiences here as a result, imo.

Dunno if this issue can even be fixed for a more rounded experience on all PC's, (developer eventually confirmed the link between performance and physics in a YouTube comment, but he didn't seem to surprised about it's existence :\) but it really should be.

[LongcrierCat]

I actually spent time on the game without a high end computer. Some refurbished computer and most of the time the game was doing 15-20 FPS on minimum settings. I understand that a lot of games have low draw distance just to save on RAM performance so that the games don't stutter whereas this game is both the technical and visual prowess of getting to feel like you're in the world of Sonic the Hedgehog. The show is in the fact that you get to see this vast world where there's just so much to do (like collecting Chaos Emeralds and uncovering something beautiful, koffkoff). I could tell that that was putting a dampening experience on the actual physics and substance of the game and I do hope that they can figure out what variables in the code need to be fixed. 

But even without a high performance this still plays like a dream. I've heard from friends who looked into Sonic Adventure's code to see what Yuji Naka was doing to try to get the game to play like how it should and this game feels like the full realization of everything 3D Sonic was meant to be. I can't stop having good thoughts about what this is going to do for Sonic gaming in the future. At this point someone might remake Sonic 3 and Knuckles in 3D and utterly nail that kind of game. 

Okay, so speculation on improvement time. I think that they could do some much better fluid level design if they kept that gate in the first area but either got rid of the tunnel or make it far shorter. Sonic needs Mach State to break it, Knuckles uses his fists to just ram through, but Tails? He needs a way over it entirely. Making the tunnel shorter and building more landmass and level on top of the tunnel will help give him a lot of leeway to get to the rest of the Paradise. And in turn any other high flying or high jumping character that can't just break the tunnel gate through speed or sheer force has a way to enjoy the rest of the stage. This level is already built high and would be perfect to accommodate Tails and Knuckles gameplay if you just give Tails, and anyone else that fits that credential of being not too physically strong in the Sonic Universe, that leeway path. This keeps Sonic's Mach State unique to him and similarly ability using characters like Shadow and Blaze while giving characters that don't have that ability something else to work with.

The physics will be same for all of the characters obviously, but Sonic has to be the fastest one in the game. He's the only one in his own speed class with Shadow and Blaze who should have a Mach State. That makes him special among his friends. He's the fastest one. But his friends have other abilities that are fun for use. Knuckles climbs and glides but can also roll off of slopes and gain some jump momentum to glide to a wall and climb it at a higher vantage point. Momentum travels to Tails' heigh when he jumps off of a slope and he flies faster upwards. Apply these principles to every playable character and their abilities. Shadow, Rouge, Omega, Bunnie Rabbot, Sally, Charmy Bee, whoever you want playable, these three are the baseline for your Sonic game and if this game succeeds at everything I spelled out this is easily the foundation for a Sonic game where you're not just playing as Sonic all the time yet Sonic still feels like the star and best one to play as. 

That doesn't sound too shabby now, does it? 

[Lucid Dream]

I don't understand why there's so much hype over this game. It's far inferior than any Sonic game. 

For an amatuer beta fan game, it's good. Platforming is so annoying due to how slippery Sonic is and how bad the level design is. It's not particularly more expansive than the typical Sonic game either, considering that it basically just got all the multiple platforms you typically see in a Sonic game and just stacked it side by side to make an open field. There's nothing fun about exploring either. There're no artistic achievements, or any pleasures from exploring the stage. You cannot do any platforming whatsoever when you're going fast, and If I wanted to go fast for the sake of going fast, than I'd play a racing game. Also, half the time I felt like I wasn't making any progress. There's a sleuth of other problems, but others have already mentioned that.  

The mach speed system is pretty cool, and I would like to see somethiing similar to it in Sonic. The idea of having speed be both a reward and an advantage is really cool. it needs a lot more polish though. The graphics are pretty nice, as is the camera system. That's it for the positives. 

Why is this game getting so much love for just being open world? Why is Open world considered so superior to linear? Well, I guess Sega should try to make the illusion of a more open world 3D game like Sonic Adventure. But to sacrifice multiple pathways, and platforming just for some silly exploration is way out there. 

[Indigo Rush]

50 minutes ago, Lucidream said:

Why is this game getting so much love for just being open world? 

It's not. It's popular for making an earnest effort to make a 3D platformer with Classic Sonic momentum mechanics. It having large areas to explore is a design choice to allow us to play around with those physics. 

[Lucid Dream]

50 minutes ago, Indigo Rush said:

It's not. It's popular for making an earnest effort to make a 3D platformer with Classic Sonic momentum mechanics. It having large areas to explore is a design choice to allow us to play around with those physics. 

So it's popular because nostalgia? That's even worse, and actually seems to be the case.

But I think I understand what you mean. Nevertheless, it's still increadibly difficult to do any platforming while going that fast, and if it's going to be that expansive than they can't use micro platforming or multiple pathways to help fix that issue. Sega is competant, but I don't know if they are competant enough to be able to pull off such a feat on their first, or even second try. I'm assuming you want to do more than simply run around though. 

I think what really irkes me the most is how much attention this is getting despite being a very subpar fan game. 

[Diogenes]

I took another shot at this with absolute minimum quality settings this time, and I feel like it helped...just a tiny bit. But even with settings so low that most of the level looked like it had come out of Minecraft, the main problems I have with the game didn't go away. Colliding with anything (or sometimes nothing) grinds you to a halt. Sonic feels, at varying points, too slippery, too twitchy, and too stiff, but practically never "good". The slope physics are so heavy that climbing any hill, if you don't already have boost mode, is painful. The camera is a constant obstacle. Strangely the boost mode seems much more finicky to keep than it does in the game's trailer. I feel like the incredibly stiff turning given to the roll is also being applied to the slope physics while rolling (rather than just to player-controlled turning) in a way that is very unnatural. And there are a number of small, clearly secondary issues that, on their own, would not drag this experiment down much, but combined with everything else make it a serious pain to play.

I would be willing to believe that some of these issues are still due to it running on my definitely-not-a-gaming-rig laptop compared to whatever it was designed and tested on, but even given that I don't feel like this is proving the point it set out to prove. And that's a real shame, because that point is almost exactly the one I have been trying to make for years. I appreciate the attempt, but I'm left still waiting for someone to do 3D Sonic right.

[Sonic The Badass]

Been playing with it for some good few hours now. Once you get the controls down its pretty good. I love messing around in the game to see what I can do. Sure it's a little rough and has some collision issues but I'm not complaining. It serves as a tech demo for probably one of the best gameplay concepts I've seen for 3D Sonic. If Sonic Team were to pick this concept up, smoothen out the rough edges and actually design some levels that are linear enough to at least let you know where you should be heading it would be great. This was pretty fun to do.

 

[JezMM]

Finally got round to trying this and I too wasn't enamoured.  I'm a tough customer to start with because I like the boost games, but yeah, this just never felt good at any point.  Even putting myself into a classic Sonic mindset, basic tasks like using a half-pipe to build speed or using a spin dash to get up a slope are a total battle to perform in this demonstration compared to the 2D games.  I 100% agree with Tracker how this serves far more as a demonstration for why Sonic Team made the choices they have regarding Sonic in 3D as oppose to proving 2D Sonic can work in 3D.

And whether Sonic was going slow or fast, he never just felt "good" to be in control of.  I second Diogenes comments that Sonic feels very stiff and awkward here, not like a bouncy, smooth ball on legs as he does in the classic games.

Just, my entire experience with the demo was repeatedly trying to do what I thought the game was encouraging me to do, almost making it to the tops of slopes, wall runs, and pipes before clipping on geometry or losing momentum and falling off to the ground, trying a few times, saying "fuck it I can't be arsed" and taking the easy, flat path in front of me until I found the next encouragement to try and do something more interesting than playing it like a standard platformer, failing that four times, saying "fuck it I can't be arsed" and so on and so forth all the way until I reached the goal.  In fact when I reached the goal I turned around and tried to explore some other paths to give it a chance but about ten visits into the lake later I ran out of patience.

A noble effort and I hate to be so utterly harsh on a true labour of love like this, but it ain't for me.  I'll take heavily scripted but satisfying/consistent/tight boost gameplay and see that get developed more/brought a little closer to Sonic Adventure's 3D gameplay over this personally.

[Hyp3hat]

Finally got around to this.... 

Wow, it's rough - Either the basic idea is solid and the level design is just useless in allowing you to explore it, or the idea is naff and the level design just does it no favours. I can't tell because doing pretty much anything in this is immensely frustrating. 

The momentum, such as it is, feels very weird - Sonic is way too floaty in the air, so attempting to jump on something whilst moving at even basic running speed will send you flying with little or no control (this is a complaint I have with Lost World, too, although you have more control in that). The Mach State offers zero control - twice when trying to run through a loop in that state  it just sent me flying off the edge, even though i was steering. Mapping Spin dash to two buttons is weird, but then you'll never use it because it's embarrassingly weak. Mach State also doesn't last long enough to get through the tutorial area for it, and it's generally just super frustrating to use. 

There's also just a bunch of aesthetic niggles too - why is everything so tiny? Why is the colour palette so that the homing attack reticule blends into the scenery? Does Sonic even have eyes? 

It's just irritating and not intuitive to control, and really confirms my suspicion that the Super Monkey Ball-esque pinball Sonic game is absolutely not how the series should control in 3D. I mean, these guys clearly believe that it is and have spent years sinking their own unpaid time, blood, sweat and tears into it, and whilst I don't expect professional polish, I do expect the mechanics to be fun and engaging. They aren't. 

 

Or wot Jez said.

[Kfarc]

So I just collected all 7 seven chaos emeralds and put about 3 hours of my life into this little project and... I regret it. Before this game I thought that this idea could work. On paper it looks good, but... I don't now. While map is big, level design seems claustrophobic. And it's not fun. Rolling in halfpipe to get speed? It's preety hard to get in exact position. And even then, after a while, boost mode will kick in changing rules in a second. And it's not fun. Also, Sonic is too sensitiv for this type of speed. Even small adjusments of trajectory have to be made with a surgical precision. And it's not fun.  Getting on top of the hill is a chalange in itself. And it's not fun. And guess what set pieces are like. Hard, too narrow and... yeah not fun.

I realy wanted to like that game. I thought the concept was at least interesting. I love previous game of that team, Green hill paradise. But in the end this little project, this proof of concept is... not fun. Even Super Sonic isn't so Super. I now that there is a way to get a Hyper Sonic in GHPA2, but I don't have enough determination to do that. A weak spindash, a wierd, control-changing boost mode, claustophobic parts, they tired me.

[The Man On The Inside]

So this is really the first time I've seen the classic sonic gameplay translated into 3D. Doing things like loops and corkscrews manually is a fun gameplay challenge, and is uniquely Sonic too. I can see the developers have included a number of segments from classic level design too - half pipes work the way they should, that is if you can land on them exactly right. Should it be difficult to land exactly right on the halfpipe? Well the developers want to run with the idea that you should earn your speed, so if utilised correctly by the level designers (i.e. never should there be a place where you're required to hit one perfectly to progress) then I think they could work.

To finally be able to experience loops, corkscrews, half-pipes, and classic Sonic physics in 3D with no automation is amazing and really is what Sonic Team should have been iterating on since 1999. As predicted, taking the automation away makes the player feel more immersed, as it was them who provided the momentum that got them around these obstacles, and manoeuvring Sonic such that he doesn't fall off of loops/corkscrews takes skill, and is immensely satisfying to successfully navigate. They even lend themselves to difficulty really well - imagine a harder path containing a really thin loop!

Overall, I feel that GHP2 is the perfect prototype level for a 3D Sonic game. Here we have a testing ground (or rather, playground) for classic sonic in 3D and to me it works. It really bloody works! 

Now onto the level design. It is admirable that they went for open-world, but I feel like the next step for the developers is to look at the SSX series and their levels - clearly linear, and yet filled with tons of alternate paths, shortcuts, hidden areas, secrets, you name it. Once you're through the tunnel in GHP2 it is incredibly easy to get lost. The next step is to dial back the open-world just a tad, and create a sequence of levels that starts off really easy and progresses in difficulty as you go. through them.